Backup and recovery software products are crucial for enterprise level network clients. Customers rely on backup systems to efficiently back up and recover data in the event of user error, data loss, system outages, hardware failure, or other catastrophic events to allow business applications to remain in service or quickly come back up to service after a failure condition or an outage. Data protection and comprehensive backup and disaster recovery (DR) procedures become even more important as enterprise level networks grow and support mission critical applications and data for customers.
A backup window is the time available to perform and finish a backup operation, which is directly related to the backup process itself. Depending on the size of the data to be backed up (savesets), system down time, which may be on the order of hours, must be identified in a business process. Because data backup is a necessary activity, this leads to definite reduction in productive hours. Backup snapshot capability at various levels such as volume and application, alleviate the need for down time and enable backup operations to perform even during production. However, there is still a need to perform swift backups of enormous data sets (ranging in TBs or even more). Also, conventional backup technologies typically send data in a single stream. Block based backup techniques greatly improve backup times over file level backups. However, present block based backups stream data sequentially, resulting in poor utilization of network resources, and under-utilization of network resources.
What is needed, therefore, is a backup method that reduces backup window times and that streams multiple extents of savesets in parallel to achieve rapid backups.
The subject matter discussed in the background section should not be assumed to be prior art merely as a result of its mention in the background section. Similarly, a problem mentioned in the background section or associated with the subject matter of the background section should not be assumed to have been previously recognized in the prior art. The subject matter in the background section merely represents different approaches, which in and of themselves may also be inventions. EMC, Data Domain, Data Domain Restorer, and Data Domain Boost are trademarks of EMC Corporation.